UTAS - NeCTAR

Responses by University of Tasmania NeCTAR consultation paper
Contributors: Professor Paddy Nixon, Professor Nathan Bindoff, Dr Tim Moltman and Mr
John Parry
Contact:
Professor Paddy Nixon
Pro Vice Chancellor for Research
The University of Tasmania
eResearch Tools: Key questions for the sector
RT1: What principles could underpin the prioritisation of Research Tool development?
• Tools should have a community focus on Foster co-operation between research
disciplines and organisations;
• Tools development should be linked to national priority areas;
• Equal focus should be given to new tool development and to evolution or
enhancements of current tools and services that exist within the international
community and also nationally;
• Research tools should build on, where appropriate, open standards in both client and
server side systems, i.e work in the OGC and OpenDAP communities.
• Tools development should emphasise support for federation or aggregation of
disparate data sets in order to provide researchers with flexibility in how they exploit
data services; and
• Sustainability of tools and asscoaited investment should be a priority. This will require
that training in the use of tools, support and documentation are part of the core
planning process.
RT2: While we are not soliciting proposals for eResearch Tool creation at this stage, can you
identify the priority areas for research tool improvement in your disciplinary area?
• Tools for publication and discovery of research data sets;
• Tools for managing legacy data sets, transforming them from ad hoc standards to
community standards;
• Tools that support metadata management both generically and in specific domains;
and
• Tools that enable aggregation and stream based computation of both static and realtime
data sources.
RT2: While we are not soliciting proposals for eResearch Tool creation at this stage, can you
identify any existing eResearch tool capabilities where the application of funds for further
development (and for making the tool available nationally) would create immediate value for
the national research community?
• Tools for publication of data around existing standards, eg open geopsatial
consortium standards (eg geonet) and also related clients in both the geospatial
communities and climate marine communities;
• Tools for publication of data sets, both modelling and observations that include
OpenDAP servers (eg Hyrax, and THREDDS) and also the clients that make use of
these servers including matlab;
• Tools that allow remote computation with published data sets and model simulations,
and allow these computations to be performed more easily on data discoveries from
repositories. One of the key features here is the integration of analysis and
observations in an environment; and

• The easy and natural deployment of simulation environments for scientific hypothesis
testing is a new area for tool development. For example, a low resolution climate
models like the CSIRO Mk3L, or the ecosystems models (reef scenarios) or
oceanographic models like ROMS.
RT3: Are you aware of any existing tools or services that would be ready, at an early stage,
to engage with NeCTAR as an ‘exemplar’ project and demonstrate value to the sector?
• There are many tools (eg data fabric delivered by ARCS, the computational grid
operated by ARCS and increasingly used by the wider community, the AAF is
particularly important and increasingly valuable as the number of services grow that
are of use by the research community. Of particular note are the digital repositories
operated by IMOS (or eMii) and TPAC which provide internationally utilised portals.
RT4: What computing platform and interoperation standards in your field need to be taken
into consideration in planning for this investment?
• A number of specific standards around sensor based systems, such as the general
SensorML and its associated specific instances are particularly relevant for
environmental monitoring systems.
RT5: What data security issues are there, specific to your field of research, that may
need to be considered in planning for this investment?
• Standards for security should be established by a national body and all projects
directed to conform to these requirements. This will ensure a standards based open
access policy is established, maintained, and developed separate from institutional
governance arrangements; and
• Certain communities value sharing and collaboration over explicit security
mechanisms. For example, in the field of climate and oceanographic research there
is a low level of data security identified by the user base.
RT6: What support do you see as necessary to promote the success of NeCTAR and the
provision of sustainable eResearch tool capabilities in your field of research?
• Marketing: there must be clear methods of communicating the activities and
informing the relevant groups about the activities in NeCTAR. It could be weekly
emails, e-Research conferences, road shows, and web sites, and general literature.\;
• Training is essential in getting the research community to adopt and use the tools
more widely, and with greater skill. The value of training cannot be under-estimated,
both of the developers, and also of the users. Many services are poorly utilised
because they are not understood by the research community, and thereby loosing
the opportunity to engage and transform.
• Good governance is also important to inform and communicate. Commitment of the
participants must be real, and the participants must have a history of tangible
involvement in the e-Research activities and use of tools and their development.
• The development of tools must be directed, in part, by the research users of the
tools. A strong relationship to researchers and their involvement in the tool
development increases the chances of successful implementations of enhanced tools
and their developments.

Virtual Laboratories: Key questions for the sector
VL1: While we are not soliciting proposals for Virtual Laboratory development at
this stage, what research areas should be prioritised for involvement in the Virtual
Laboratory component of the project?
• Keys areas for the University of Tasmania are: Climate research, Marine and
Antarctic Sciences, Environmental sensing and monitoring, Health data research –
Rural Health, Epigenetics and Neuroscience in particular, Chemistry, Astronomy,
Food Science, and perhaps less obviously the Creative Arts – with a particular focus
on community engagement.
VL2: Are there existing Virtual Laboratory or similar capabilities that would be ready to
engage early with NeCTAR as an exemplar and demonstrate value to the sector?
• IMOS is a compelling example of a highly evolved virtual collaborative laboratory;
and
• Early developments in the area of Human Interface Technologies are being built
through a multisite virtual laboratory in collaboration with The University of
Washington (USA) and Canterbury University (NZ).
VL3: What additional support might be required to bring these exemplars to fruition? It
should be noted that this might take the shape of existing institutional or other resources that
might assist with implementation.
no comment
VL4: Early expressions of interest are sought to gain a sense of the size of the budget
allocation and co---­‐investment required.
• The University of Tasmania, in conjunction with the State government and other
providers, is developing exemplar projects for the near-term NBN roll-out. We
propose that this specific question is made as a component of the Townhall
meetings.

Research Cloud: Questions for the sector
RC1: Does your research area have a preferred model for delivery of this component?
• No, except that in the analysis space, the cloud computing environment should have
the capacity to allow a high level of transparency to move large data sets, to analyse
these data with common software tools (eg matlab, ferret, grads, octave, python, R)
on remote servers with little additional overhead in terms of learning by the user.
Note comments about the ARCS grid below.
RC2: While we are not soliciting proposals for Research Cloud development at this stage,
what existing applications should be prioritised for migration to a research cloud
infrastructure? ---­‐ What resources might be required to carry out this migration? ---­‐ What
external requirements, if any, must be met for such a migration? ---­‐ What is the expected
scale of demand for these resources in your research field? ---­‐ What special security issues,
if any, might apply to such a migration in your research field?
• Range of deployable climate and ocean models, ranging from the physical to
ecosystems that could be appropriately deployed in the cloud as part of a general
project. The reefscenarios project is an example of this type of deployable model.
• Analysis tools for marine and oceanograographic and climate data sets are perfect
for cloud computing, common applications tools range from matlab, idl, ferrett, octave
python.
RC3: Are there any other types of infrastructure (non---­‐cloud) that would better meet your
needs?
no comment
National Servers: Questions for the sector
NS1: What special server requirements does your research require, including the need for
24x7 support, uptime requirements, network connectivity and redundancy?
• see comments below about ARCS services. The key is in an operational system is
to have a suite of sustained services that are professionally supported with
reasonably intuitive interfaces. The services must be reliable and robust and operate
in a "transparent" way.
NS2: What existing special servers do you currently maintain?
• we operate portals for discovery and access to marine and climate data on behalf of
researchers national at TPAC and IMOS. We also operate OpenDAP servers,
THREDDS servers, subversion repositories, licensing arrangements for numerical
models eg UK Met office Unified Model, and CSIRO Mk3L.
NS3: What are their server infrastructure requirements?
• requirements are growing to now include servers with multiple cpu's, fast disk and
high connectivity to data stores. Minimum of 16 cpu, 64 gbytes of ram and links to
petabyte stores are a reasonable norm.

NS4: What sort of criteria should be devised for admitting services for virtual server support
and resource allocation?
• Should be sufficient demand community;
• Alignment with national priority research; and
• Long term sustainability.

ARCS tools and services: Questions for the sector
ARCS1: What functionality delivered through the ARCS tools and services is important for
your research?
For our research the following are important to be sustained and operated into the future
with appropriate support (both helpdesk for users and developers who depend on these
services). It is important that these services are not disrupted through the transition from
ARCS to NeCTAR arrangements. The following ARSC services are:
• The ARCS data fabric;
• The ARCS cloud or grid computing;
• The AAF, essential service that improves the integration of services provided by
ARCS and related service providers;
• ARCS video conferencing service, which is currently EVO;
• ARCS help desk and customer services that are operated nationally on a 24/7 basis;
and
• Professional customer and researcher support, delivered as a set of coherent
working services at a national level that facilitates the research base in cross
institution. Working and robust (reliable) services are central to e-Research
activities, and high levels of robustness cannot be achieved with out consistent
professionally applied methods of business practises that are well supported at an
operational and design level.
ARCS2: What changes or improvements to these services would you like to see in order to
better deliver this functionality?
Potential improvements and enhancements to the services ARCS has developed and
delivered could include:
• Systematic integration between Institutional Service Desks/Support teams (providing
Tier 1 support) and a national eResearch Service Desk (providing Tier 2 and Tier 3
support) for core national eResearch services;
• Improvements to the look and feel of the web interface for the Compute Cloud/Grid;
• Full integration between the Compute Cloud/Grid and the ARCS Data Fabric;
• Standardised interface (API) for the easy building of customised applications and
portals by research communities; and
• Support and integration of basic workflows and discipline-specific workflows.
For the ARCS Data Fabric
• Development of additional research community driven interfaces and services using
the underlying Data Fabric/National File System;
• A simple-to-use and automatic drag-and-drop utility to remotely move very large data
sets from one place to another with high performance, e.g., either across the country,
between storage sites or into and out of the Data Fabric;
• Development of improved desktop and hand-held device integration including
automatic synchronisation;
• An increased capability to store confidential data to meet sector needs including,
e.g., medical and population health data, bio-secuity data, criminal justice data, etc;
• Performance improvements through closer integration with underlying storage
infrastructure and, in particular, with the forthcoming RDSI nodes.
ARCS Compute Cloud and Grid

• Improvements to the look and feel of the web interface for the Compute Cloud/Grid;
• Full integration between the Compute Cloud/Grid and the ARCS Data Fabric;
• Standardised interface (API) for the easy building of customised applications and
portals by research communities; and
• Support and integration of basic workflows and discipline-specific workflows.
ARCS Video Conferencing
• Creation of additional connectivity Bridges to enable researchers to attend EVO
meetings using other services, e.g., in addition to the existing Telephone Bridge and
AccessGrid Bridge, add bridges to the AARNet Video Conference service, Skype and
other common video-conferencing services;
• Improvements in audio quality for EVO, AccessGrid and the Telephone Bridge;
• Improved and simplified user interface to provide a more seamless and enjoyable
user experience;
• Enhancements to meetings including "broadcast" and "plenary/teaching" modes
which enable easy-to-use recording of meeting/sessions to a web based portal (using
the “Data Fabric” for file storage and sharing) to enable replay and sharing of the
meeting/presentation/session/lecture. (e.g., an automatic Webinar service);
• Integrating AAF authentication into EVO so that users can use their institutional
usernames and passwords for easy access; and
• Improved Whiteboard functionality to improve the ability for users in a meeting to
jointly annotate a document, photograph or image which they are simultaneously
viewing.
ARCS Security Services
• Develop and deliver tools which allow Service Providers to deliver access to any of
their non-Web-based services via the AAF, (the AAF is only designed to operate with
Web-based services);
• Work with the AAF, the research sector and IdPs to develop a comprehensive list of
AAF attributes that are optimised to allow a significant fraction of authorisation
decisions for eResearch services to be automated.